Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and co-host Jonathan Lemire said it was “impossible” for President Donald Trump to “declare victory” as the pair mockingly ran through an “unspinnable” Iran war objectives checklist on Friday.

The remarks came after Lemire pointed out that the president’s assessment that Iran had been “decimated” contrasted with a confidential intelligence community assessment, detailed by The Washington Post, which found the regime would “survive” the U.S. blockade.

After Lemire offered a quick run-through of the administration’s stated goals for the Iran conflict, Scarborough stopped him to pull out a pen so he could run down the checklist: “Let me write this down.”

“One of them was destroying the Iranian Navy,” Lemire said. “Get your pen.”

“OK, navy, OK? Check! We did that!” Scarborough replied. “So we’ve won the war, right? OK. Give me the other four, because I’m sure that we got it. I’m sure we got the other four. Two, what else we got?”

The co-host continued: “Yeah. So one of them was supposed to be destroying their ballistic missile arsenal, which we just learned they have not done. They’ve weakened it, but they have not destroyed it.”

“Oh,” Scarborough said, downcast as he marked the list.

“Third time up would be the nuke program, which they haven’t touched, has not been addressed. You know that still exists. The future of that remains uncertain,” Lemire went on.

Scarborough kept writing and wincing throughout.

“We had some talk of regime change. That hasn’t happened. The supreme leader–” Lemire began.

“How’s that work?” the host quipped.

Lemire continued: “You know, the first Supreme Leader is dead, but his son is in charge. An even hardliner group now running things in Tehran, the IRGC. We could also add the –”

Scarborough pivoted to troll Red Sox fan Lemire with a baseball analogy: “Yeah, that’s actually worse. So that would be like taking [pitcher Aroldis] Chapman out so you could put Weissert in relief duty for the Red Sox. It’s actually that much worse, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, Greg Weissert is a name we don’t want to spend much time on this morning,” Lemire replied. “And then also let’s talk about we haven’t even gotten to yet the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran now ends this war with more control.”

The co-host added: “The knowledge, not only can they menace ships through it, which they’re doing, but the knowledge they can shut it at any time, even down the road after the war comes to an end. This is impossible for President Trump, try as he will, this would be impossible for him to declare a victory at its current state.”

Scarborough, drawing a line under his list, lambasted the state of play more seriously as “unspinnable.”

“The missiles stronger than ever – and that’s again what our allies said – you’ve got to get rid of those missiles, because we will get struck because it’s an even more radicalized, if that’s even possible, a more radicalized government,” he said.

The host guffawed that now Iran was run by the “most hardened” and “embittered” individuals from the Revolutionary Guard and that the missile program was “much stronger” than expected, with the “nuclear program still intact.”

“And yet every day Donald Trump goes out, even when they’re attacking our naval ships, Donald Trump goes out and says, ‘Oh, the ceasefire is on, the ceasefire is on. Talk about the weakness this projects across the region, across the globe, and to the Iranians,” Scarborough concluded.

Watch above via MS NOW.

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